An Oklahoma Hotel Finds a Home in Frank Lloyd Wright's 1950s High-Rise

In the "before" and "after" world of interior design, it was a promising yet difficult "before" that Frank Lloyd Wright, the creator of the famous 19-story Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, bequeathed to architect Wendy Evans Joseph. She was to invent the "after," a transformation of the landmark into a luxurious eight floor, 21-room boutique hotel that opened in April as the Inn at Price Tower. Built in 1956 as headquarters for the H. C. Price Company, the tower became an endangered masterpiece when the company closed. Because its interiors were not suited for more typical office uses, the building remained unsold, and it was left abandoned and empty for years, but not dilapidated. Fortunately, a group of Bartlesville's leading citizens got together, acquired the landmark and invited Wendy Evans Joseph's firm to give it new life as a hotel.

The tower is now owned by the not-for-profit Price Tower Arts Center, which occupies the first two floors, remodeled by Joseph into galleries for architecture and design, including a permanent collection of Frank Lloyd Wright objects. Visitors can enjoy an exhibition in one of Wright's greatest buildings, stay in a luxurious guest room or two-level suite and, while dining, enjoy expansive views of the Oklahoma prairie from the 15th- and 16th-floor bar/restaurant, named Copper, after one of Wright's favorite building materials.

Because of its innovative structural system, Wright's tower floor plans were too eccentric to easily accommodate the creation of four deluxe rooms on each of the six floors devoted to lodgings. As is well known, the master conceived Price Tower as a tree. The trunk consists of four interior wall columns of reinforced concrete that extend like branches to support the cantilevered floors. This framework divides each floor into quadrants of dissimilar size and shape, based upon a grid of 30-and 60-degree triangles. Without making any changes in Wright's structure, Joseph turned each one of these quadrants into a guest room or two-level suite. The suites and the bar/restaurant are located in the southwest quadrant because Wright had made these spaces two stories high. It was not possible, however, to include a conventional bath in any of the guest rooms because of the limited size and intricate shape of each quadrant. Minimal toilet and shower facilities had to be tucked into existing small triangular corners, while carefully detailed sink areas, closets and cabinets are visible as handsome furnishings in the rooms, instead of concealed, as is customary, in an adjacent space.

Wright gave great importance to furniture, believing it to be intrinsic to his conception of architecture as organic, and he never stopped designing it. Most of his completed works have at least some furniture created by him expressly for the project, and in 1955, at 88, he designed his first line of furniture to be sold to the public. Of the pieces Wright designed for Price Tower, only those for the corporate suite and Price's office are extant. The arts center maintains those two areas as museum space.

Architect Joseph, by designing almost all the hotel's furnishings, as well as murals, throw pillows and rugs, understood that this effort would honor Wright's own tradition of total design. Much too sophisticated to make the mistake of attempting to design in Wright's manner, however, she has distinguished her own installation from Wright's envelopes of space by devising individual pieces of furniture and their arrangement in patterns that are strictly rectangular or circular, in contrast to Wright's triangular module.

"I wanted no confusion between what was there and what's new," Joseph explains. "Wright's tree, his materials, the circulation, the way the windows were done—everything was so pure and completely consistent that it was possible for me to have a consistent reaction to that and try to differentiate what we were doing from what he had done. It was never to be another version of Wright, nor of Wright's school." Joseph left all that remained in Wright's spaces—the ceiling lights, the 30- and 60-degree grid scored in the Cherokeered concrete floors, the chamfered corners of the three-person elevators.

Joseph chose a light maple for the furniture instead of the dark mahogany Wright often used, and she combined it with metals and glass and luxurious fabrics from Tibet. "Wright had selected a patinated copper throughout the tower that has a wonderful rosy, warm glow in the Oklahoma prairie light," she notes. She used the natural copper of plumbing pipe for the legs and frames of most of her furniture and for towel bars, because it was a very inexpensive way to use a very expensive material. Since the tower elevators were too small to carry completed furnishings, all the guest room pieces were hauled up to each floor and assembled there.

Wright enjoyed referring to his Price Tower as "the tree that escaped the crowded forest." He originally conceived the tower in 1929 as a project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery in New York City. Finally built 27 years later, it stood alone, the only tower in Bartlesville. Joseph likes the tree metaphor. "If Wright wanted his building to be a tree, I've given it branches and leaves. The most important thing is to ensure that Price Tower will remain a viable, living structure, a beautiful tree on the open plain." Frank Lloyd Wright might have liked that.

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